When more than 600 police officers marched into the wine town of Traben-Trarbach on the Moselle on September 26, 2019, a new era of crime on the Internet had begun.

At that time, the city not only housed a thermal bath, a fortress ruin from the 17th century and hectares of vineyards, but also more than 400 servers full of cybercrime.

Bastian Benrath

Editor in business.

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The reason for this was the new owners of a former Bundeswehr bunker on a mountain north of the city center.

After the troops withdrew, this was bought by the foundation of a man from the Netherlands who supposedly wanted to operate a data center in it to provide highly secure Internet services.

He did that too - only the customers weren't quite the ones that Traben-Trarbach had imagined.

"We have not been able to find a single legal page on the servers of the accused," said the head of the Rhineland-Palatinate state central office for cybercrime after the raid in front of the press.

Instead, the sites "Wall Street Market" and "Fraudsters", for example, were at home on the bunker servers - two important portals on which millions were redeemed in the Darknet.

Money is the motive that holds the scene together

The Darknet is an isolated part of the Internet that can only be accessed with a special program, the “Tor” browser.

Tor is an acronym for “The Onion Router”, meaning “onion router”.

In principle, the program works like the standard Firefox and Chrome browsers, except that it encrypts its connections over several servers, each of which only knows the previous and the next in the chain - like the layers of an onion.

The developers behind it are committed to protecting victims of authoritarian regimes from state reprisals, for example.

At the same time, however, they also equip cybercriminals with the greatest possible anonymity.

Malicious software was ordered via the portals that had been exposed in Traben-Trarbach, stolen data was marketed, and drug and arms deals were carried out. When the Frankfurt General Prosecutor's Office later brought charges against the operators of the “Wall Street Market”, they announced that 2.4 tons of cannabis products and 75 kilograms of cocaine had been sold via the platform in three years. If you extrapolate the street selling prices of the drugs, the goods were worth around 30 million euros.

Darknet portals look almost exactly like Ebay, Amazon or other legal sales platforms from the normal Internet, which experts call "Clearnet" in contrast to the Darknet.

There are photos of the goods and a rating system that customers can use to rate the seller and his items with up to five stars.

The only obvious differences are that the seller only shows an alias and that payments cannot be made with credit cards or PayPal, but only in Bitcoin or other digital currencies.

With these, the payer and recipient hide behind pseudonyms and can hardly be traced.

There are some experts who associate the recent soaring of the Bitcoin price with the increase in cybercrime.